Not sure I want to hear where this is going.
“How is it, then, that you got her stinking, rotting body propped up on your couch?”
Lint whirled around, his hands in fists.
“Don’t talk about her like that?”
“Careful, bud.” Burton motioned him to put his hands back.
Lint ignored him.
“Jilly had a little accident,” Lint said. ”I found her hurting. I fixed her up. She wants to live with me now. She says I’m her main boyfriend...”
“Did you also find her without any clothes on?”
“Don’t talk dirty about her! I’m her main boyfriend! I’m the one she wants!”
“Yeah, okay...Bill, right? Your first name’s Bill?”
Lint nodded.
“Just stay put.” Burton shifted his Glock semi-automatic to one hand and reached into his jacket for his cell phone. “But do it down wind over there.”
2
“Well, I appreciate your concern, but, really, I think I’m quite safe.” Portia sat primly across from Detective Kazmaroff, a coffee table full of china cups and creamers between them.
“My partner and I feel that may not be absolutely the case,” Kazmaroff said, taking a sip of the hot tea.
Portia pushed a glossy lock of blonde hair back from her face. She wore a voluptuous Dolce & Gabbana knit dress, revealing her excellent figure and a good deal of cleavage.
“Well, I can’t imagine--” she started.
“You see, Mrs. Stephens...” Dave set his cup down and flipped open his notebook. “It seems that when we went through Tess’s...Miss Andersen’s things...we found a note that fairly clearly involves her in Jilly’s murder--”
“I...I don’t believe you!” Portia’s hand flew to her mouth. It trembled noticeably.
“In fact, the note is very specific about the details of that last ride with the three of you...”
“Tess would never have left such a note!”
“I don’t think Miss Andersen expected to be checking out quite so soon,” Kazmaroff said, smiling. “Are there more cookies?”
Portia pulled on the rings on her fingers and rubbed her hands together in agitation.
“She didn’t mention me in the note?” she asked, unhappily.
“Well, actually, yes, she did,” Kazmaroff said. “Not only did Miss Andersen confess to killing Jilly...something I guess you’ve known all along...but she said you were an accomplice to--”
“It’s a lie!” Portia stood up. “It’s a foul lie! I had nothing to do with it!”
“Well, Miss Andersen wrote--”
“I don’t care what Tess wrote! It isn’t true!”
“You knew what Tess intended to do in the clearing.”
“Scare Jilly! That’s all I knew she intended to do.”
“I don’t believe you, Mrs. Stephens.”
“Scare her! Scare her! That’s all! She said they were going to play a joke on her!”
“‘They’?”
“They...Tess and the guy.” Portia sat back down and put her face, so carefully made up, in her hands.
“Who was the guy?”
“I have no idea. I heard them talking after I left the clearing. I heard the guy’s voice and then...well, then, Jilly screaming...so I just raced back to the barn as fast as I could. Zanzibar even got a nasty scratch across his left flank. Later, Tess said it all went horribly wrong.”
“More for some than others,” Kazmaroff said.
Portia looked up at him.
“Did Tess really leave a note?”
“Really? No.”
Portia held herself very straight, her hands gripped tightly in her lap. She blew out a long breath, then hung her head like a marionette collapsing after a performance.
“Does it make me an accomplice if I thought they were just going to scare her but it didn’t work out that way?” she whispered.
“You’ve been withholding information.”
“I was afraid.”
Kazmaroff smiled at the maid bringing in a fresh plate of cookies.
“You should be,” he said.
3
Burton put his cell phone away. His hunch about Portia had been correct. All the pieces were finally beginning to fall together. All but the footprint, and perhaps that could be explained once he and Kazmaroff laid out all the evidence and clues in logical order. He looked at Lint, who was huddled in a crouch by a tree picking pine needles out of his socks.
We got Jilly’s body, and we know who killed her. It’s just a matter now of making all roads lead to the right spot.
“My friends will be here soon,” Burton said.
“You don’t have to talk down to me,” Lint said sullenly. “I know you’re a cop.”
“Yes, well, then, my cop friends will be here soon.” Burton walked to the trailer. He felt he should cover her but a part of him rationalized that it didn’t really matter.
Instantly, Lint was on his feet.
“Where you going?” he demanded.
“You got a bedspread or something for Miss Jilly?” Burton asked, holding a handkerchief to his face and peering into the trailer.
“She don’t like to be too hot!” Lint’s voice began to rise.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Burton muttered, as he took a step into the trailer. He spotted a stained afghan across one of the chairs. He turned to call to Lint: “I’m just going to--”
The blow hit him hard across the temple.
4
The policemen hoisted Mark Travers, screaming and kicking, into the jail cell.
“I want my lawyer! You can’t do this to me! I’ll see you bastards lose your badges!”
One of the cops boxed Travers on the ear.
“Shut-up, ass-hole. Unless you want to wake up your new sleeping partners.” They turned and left, clanging the jail door loudly as if they intended to do just that.
Travers gripped the bars and pressed his face into them.
“I want my lawyer!” he wailed.
“Hey, knock it off!” a voice growled to him from the interior of the cell.
Mark whimpered and dared a look over his shoulder in the direction of the voice.
Another voice chimed in:
“Yeah, it ain’t so bad. It’s just overnight, right?”
Travers turned around and tried to make out the shapes of his companions in the dark.
“You guys in here just for the night, too?” he asked, relaxing somewhat as he envisioned a group of sleepy deadbeat dads and DUIs.
“Oh, yeah,” one of the voices said, laughing. “Just one night. Besides, usually, that’s all it takes, lover.”
More voices joined in on the mounting laughter.
5
The first thing Burton saw when he awoke, was Best-Boy’s feet. His head exploding in pain, he rolled away from the massive animal’s hooves and sat up.
Stupid! What were you doing? Protecting Jilly’s modesty or something?
His hand flew to his shoulder holster and he expelled a sigh of relief. His gun was there. Quickly, he scanned the clearing. No sign of Lint. He jogged over to the trailer and peered in the door. The interior of the trailer didn’t smell as bad. Probably because Jilly’s corpse had been removed.
Cursing, he turned back to the horse and gathered up the reins. Just as he was about to swing up into the saddle, he heard singing.
Burton drew his gun and held it straight down at his side. He walked carefully in the direction of the voice, lilting up and down melodically, a nonsense tune, like one being made up as the singer goes along.
He edged around the trailer. There, an old Dodge Valiant was parked on gravel and dirt. Leaning against the fender was a shot gun. The passenger door was open but no one was visible. He paused, watching the car, trying to decide what to do next.
Suddenly, Lint came from out of the bushes, carrying Jilly’s body in his arms. He’d partially covered her in the bedspread. As Lint approached the car, ob
viously intending to put the corpse into it, he scraped his load against a pine tree. Burton watched one of Jilly’s pale, slim arms detach and flop to the ground. Lint cursed.
Burton moved out of the shadows and pointed his gun at Lint.
“Put it down,” he said loudly.
Lint seemed to flinch at the sound of Burton’s voice. He hesitated.
“Do it now!” shrieked Burton. He didn’t want Lint getting any closer to the car and the shotgun.
Lint began a slow squat with the body in his arms. Burton could see Jilly’s eyes staring unseeing up to the fair November sky. He seemed to be resisting any separation from the body. Suddenly, he dumped it on the ground, revealing a small dove-hunting rifle, which he raised and fired at Burton.
6
Kazmaroff sped down the tractor-road leading to the barn. He snapped shut his cell phone and tossed it in the passenger seat.
Burton wasn’t answering, and their back-up was still trying to negotiate the evening-before-Thanksgiving traffic.
He, himself, would also be sitting on Peachtree Industrial Road if he hadn’t been at Portia Stephen’s house-- just a few miles north of the barn.
Why wasn’t he answering?
Kazmaroff accelerated, sending up a choking veil of dust and dirt on the road behind him.
7
The bullet tore into Burton’s shoulder. He felt the fire explode down his whole left side as he flung himself to the ground, firing his Glock semi-automatic as he went down. Amid the pounding thunder of the blood rushing to his head and the report of his own gun, he could hear the sounds of police sirens as if they are coming from far away. He could also hear that Lint was still shooting.
Twisting on the ground in pain and in search for cover, Burton fired off two more rounds, then scrambled into a thorny bush. He didn’t feel the merciless brambles tear into his clothes and skin. He held his breath and listened. It was quiet.
On the ground in front of Jilly’s body, lay Lint. The spreading crimson pool surrounding both him and the other body like a conspiratorial hug.
Slowly, agonizingly, Burton extricated himself from the shrub. He held his left arm carefully against his chest, aware that the wound seemed to have stopped bleeding. It still hurt like hell.
He stood over Lint, then squatted and touched the man on the neck, looking for the carotid artery.
“Jesus!” A voice came out of the wilderness.
Burton looked up to see Dave Kazmaroff jerk open his car door and run across the clearing to him. Jack hadn’t even heard the car drive up.
His second thought as he watched his burly partner briefly examine the bodies and begin talking into his cell phone, was relief that he was there to take over.
His first thought was that he’d be damned if he’d pass out in front of him.
Chapter Eleven
1
Kazmaroff pulled up in front of Jack Burton’s house and idled the car, waiting while Burton collected himself.
“So, the doc said it’s just a scratch?” he peered into the rear view mirror. A few of Burton’s neighbors were standing in the street.
Burton grunted.
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “It just chipped me. It’ll heal by Christmas. Thanks for the ride.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Dave said. “I don’t have Thanksgiving Day plans either.” He indicated Burton’s dark, obviously unoccupied, house with a jerk of his head.
Burton decided to let it go and get out of the car before the drugs wore off. He swung open the door, careful not to jar his bandaged left shoulder.
“The Chief says it’s a collar,” Kazmaroff said.
Burton hesitated.
“Well, it’s certainly something,” he said.
“No, man, he says we got him. He’s very happy.”
“When did you talk to the Chief?”
“While you were in the Emergency room.”
“The footprint doesn’t fit Lint.”
Kazmaroff frowned.
“You telling me you don’t think Lint killed Jilly?” he asked, turning in the drivers seat to face Burton.
Burton sat in the car as if dredging up the strength to get out. He stared through the windscreen.
If not Lint, than who?
“I’m saying I’m tired,” he said. “And the little pills the doc gave me have definitely kicked in.” Burton edged out of the car and closed the car door with his foot. He tottered on the curb for a moment, looking at his unlighted, unwelcoming home. Two of his neighbors walked by and he nodded a greeting to them.
When they passed, he looked at Kazmaroff through the passenger’s side window.
“And the footprint doesn’t fit Lint.”
2
The next morning was Thanksgiving Day and it shone bright and clear at Bon Chance Stables. The sunlight was sharp and the wind was nippy. Just the way Margo liked it for an autumn hack in the woods.
Unfortunately, that’s not in the cards, she thought as she brushed Beckett, her quarter horse. Her ribs were still too sore to do any riding. It had taken her a full fifteen minutes just to get his sheet off him. And now, instead of neatly folded at the corners and draped over his stall front, it lay in a tangled hill of waterproof canvas where she’d tossed it in the tack room.
The other horses were still in the pasture. She was late calling them in for their breakfast. Normally, she’d have had Beckett groomed-- and exercised!--and all the stall-boarders munching quietly in each of their stalls by now.
Hell, normally, Jessie would’ve done it.
But it was Thanksgiving Day, and even Jessie had some other place to go; some group of people she called family who wanted to see her, demanded her presence at their holiday table.
Margo grimaced and tossed the dandy brush into her open tack trunk. She had Beckett tied in front of the wash stand in the open end of the north barn. From here she could see the entire barn complex to the south, and the undulating, brown hills and scrub pasture to the north and north east.
Imagine, she thought, staring at the hill, dotted with spiky Georgia pines. Every time she’d endured that idiot in the last week...every time she’d given him an order, patiently explained something to him, or simply suffered his malodorous presence--he’d later gone back to that trailer of his on the south loop of the polo pasture trail and made love to Jilly’s dead body.
Margo rubbed her eyes with a tired hand. The exertion of grooming Beckett had been too much. Her arm trembled.
And now Bill was dead, too. Jilly and Tess and Bill.
Margo sat down on an upturned rubber bucket. Beckett turned his head to look at her.
So was it Bill who had tried to kill her? Bill, who had drugged Traveler? That didn’t make sense!
Margo touched Beckett on his flank and the spot quivered beneath her fingers.
If Bill was in love with Jilly and thought the only way he could get her to cooperate was to kill her first, well, Margo could see that. But why kill Margo, too? She had certainly not suspected him. And she wasn’t that tough on him!
Margo stood up and massaged the small of her back. Her ribs complained loudly. It was time to feed the horses. She debated putting Beckett in the pasture and decided she didn’t have the energy to walk him to the pasture gate. She gathered Beckett’s lead and took him back to his stall. She slipped the halter off his head, and locked the stall gate between them.
After she had filled the feed buckets in each of the stalls and whistled for the herd in the paddock, she watched them thunder into the barn, thirty horses, each unerringly dashing into his or her own stall. She locked the southend of the barn so they couldn’t return to the pasture after feeding and then walked slowly back to her trailer. The fatigue and the ache in her chest and arms seemed overwhelming. As she walked, she found herself noting once more how she had never seen the barn so quiet or so deserted. And with that observation came the thought that maybe, it was just possible, it hadn’t been Bill at all.
3
“Now this is certainly better than scrubbing out gravy bowls and wondering what to do with the turkey carcass, eh?”
Robert Shue gave his wife’s hand a little pat as they sat around a large dinner table at the Dunwoody Country Club.
She smiled in agreement, her eyes on their daughter who was using a fork to tunnel into a mountain of mashed potatoes on her plate.
“Daddy? Can we go to the game room after dinner?” The little girl buried a few green peas in her potato mountain.
“Certainly, darling,” Shue cooed. “We’ll do all the family-like activities that families do on Thanksgiving.” He turned to his wife and patted her hand again. “I’m certainly feeling thankful,” he said.
“It’s lovely,” his wife said, indicating the large elegant dining room of the country club. “But I would’ve been just as happy to have made dinner at home.”
“Nonsense! All that work? And mess? When you can afford not to?”
“My family always had Thanksgiving Dinner at home. I guess it just feels more traditional to me.” She nodded at her daughter who was begging to be excused to talk with a school mate three tables over.
“‘Your family,’” Shue sneered, then caught himself. It wasn’t really her family he loathed, after all. Just that bastard of a fucking snob brother of hers.
“Your brother took his family here last year,” he reminded her. “You didn’t think it was breaking with tradition then.”
His wife sighed.
“I guess I’m talking about when we were children,” she said quietly, almost a whisper.
“Oh, yeah, the fucking Waltons. I forgot.” Shue reached for his wine glass and then stopped. “Hey, sweetheart,” he said, reaching for her hand instead. “I don’t want to fight. I’m so happy about us--you know, as a family--and I’ve got so much to be thankful for...mostly you and Chelsea, you know?”
His wife smiled and nodded.
“I’m just so grateful for you, babe. You know that, don’t you? You know how much I love you and how happy I am?”
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